Last month, I analyzed the programming languages and UI frameworks used to create iOS 17. This month, let’s analyze macOS from OS X El Capitan 10.11 to the latest macOS Sonoma 14 and answer a few questions:
What is the total count of binaries within macOS Sonoma? Which programming languages are used to develop these apps? How many apps are written with Swift? How many apps are using Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI versus AppKit?
Now that iOS 17 is available, let’s analyze its built-in apps to answer a few questions: How many binaries are in iOS 17? Which programming languages are used to develop these apps? How many apps are written with Swift? What is the percentage of apps using SwiftUI versus UIKit?
iOS 16 was just released so let’s analyze its built-in apps. Like in the past years, I will try to answer a couple of questions: How many binaries are in iOS 16? Which programming languages are used to develop these apps? How many apps are written with Swift? What is the percentage of apps using SwiftUI versus UIKit?
iOS 15 was released a few months ago in September 2021. In this article, I analyze the built-in apps composing iOS 15. How many binaries are in iOS 15? Which programming languages are used to develop these apps? How many apps are written with Swift? Has Apple adopted SwiftUI for some built-in apps?
If you followed the recent Apple events, you probably saw a picture of the A14 and M1 dies… that got me thinking about what you would see if you could pass iOS under X-Rays…
In my previous article about the evolution of the programming languages from iPhone OS 1.0 to iOS 14, I analyzed iOS based on the number of binaries and their programming languages. As I pointed out in this past post, the size of the binaries were not taken in account. In this new article, I look at iPhone OS 1.0 and iOS 14 from a size perspective using tree maps.
In my previous article about Apple’s use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 14, I counted the number of built-in apps in iOS using Swift and SwiftUI. Several readers asked if I could provide a percentage rather than an absolute number.
In this new article, I will answer this question by measuring the total number of binaries in iOS. I will go one step further and also count the number of binaries using other programming languages: Objective-C, C++ and C.
Finally to be as complete as possible, I ran this analysis on all major iOS releases, from iPhone OS 1.0 to iOS 14. This will provide a detailed overview of the evolution of the different programming languages over more than a decade of iOS development.
Lately, many people have wondered why some iOS apps were so huge. I asked myself this question and analyzed the Facebook application for iOS v. 66.0 in 2016 and v. 87.0 in 2017.
In this article, I dissect the Nest app (5.30.5) for iOS released on 29.11.2018. There has been quite some speculations about this app in a thread started by John Gruber on Twitter:
This post will answer some simple questions about this specific app:
Which technologies are used? Why is the app so big? Would it be possible to reduce the app size?
libMobileGestalt is a private library in iOS that describes the capabilities of the device: system version, build version, device type, device features, status of the airplane mode, …
Apple obfuscates this information which makes it hard to know the capabilities of the device. In January 2017, I presented a method for Deobfuscating libMobileGestalt keys. At that time there were 673 known obfuscated keys and I managed to recover 564 out of the 673 keys (83%).
Since this previous article, Apple has released 2 major iOS versions, and new obfuscated keys have been added. In this post I quickly recap what is libMobileGestalt and provide the updated list of recovered keys.
An Asset Catalog is an important piece of any iOS, tvOS, watchOS and macOS application. It lets you organize and manage the different assets used by an app, such as images, sprites, textures, ARKit resources, colors and data.